Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Juno's Brief Home Visit on the Road to Jupiter

Episode Date: October 21, 2013

Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton reviews the spacecraft's Earth flyby and previews its long stay at our solar system's king of planets.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stopping by Earth on the way to Jupiter, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Scott Bolton last joined us as his Juno probe was leaving Earth the first time. He's back to tell us about a brief rendezvous last week that has sent the solar-powered spacecraft speeding toward the king of planets. We're going to mix things up a bit at the top of this week's show as we check in first with Bill Nye, the science guy.

Bill, I think you want to talk about something that's a little bit different on the Planetary Society website. We're so used to these pictures of planets and moons, and they're beautiful, but this is a blog entry from Bruce Batts with a photo of printed circuit boards. Well, it's a photo of patterns from photo multiplier tubes, yeah. So the Planetary Society is the only organization that does an all-sky search for extraterrestrial intelligence

looking for beams of light, probably laser light. So everybody, you can say, come on, you're not really searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. What a waste of resources, time, effort, and energy. And we say, oh no, my friends.

There's one way to make sure you do not detect a signal from another civilization, and that's to not go looking. This is a worthy pursuit. You don't take all of your resources, your entire government, every bureaucrat ever hired in the history or aerospace engineer in the history of humankind. No, it's something you do all the time in the background. You maintain the search because you just don't know what you're going to discover. By the way, I guess he's getting, he's a post-doctorate or maybe he's gotten his doctorate. Curtis Mead invented this way at Harvard, invented this way to process a terabyte a second. So that's a trillion bits a second. That's a thousand

billion bits a second. Bites. It's like eight times that many bits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yes. I mean, it's the size of the hard drive I'm recording to right now, every second or less than a second. So you have to do that in order to survey the entire sky. It's a big job. And, of course, at the Planetarium Society, we're very proud to be involved. Who knows what we'll find? It could, dare I say it, Matt, change the world.

It certainly would. I could imagine more wasteful things for the government to be doing than funding this, but we're taking care of that. Paul Horowitz, who is Curtis Mead's boss there at Harvard University, the guys who put together this study for us. Paul's been on the show a few times. You can check our archives for that, and we'll have him on again sometime soon, I'm sure. Bill, we'll have you on again next week. Thanks so much. Thank you, Matt.

That's the CEO of the Planetary Society coming to us direct from Nye Labs. Bill Nye, the science guy. We're going to go now to Emily Lakdawalla, the senior editor for the Planetary Society. Emily, it was tough to choose what to talk about this time. Maybe I'll just mention this wonderful collection of small bodies, Fascination of Tiny Worlds, which is more of what you collected from DPS. It's a great collection of images. People should take a look at this October 17 entry in the blog at planetary.org. But tell us first of all about this beautiful image of Saturn,

because I know you don't like to throw too many superlatives at images. There are so many great ones, but this one was worthy. This is a sort of portrait of Saturn that I've been waiting for Cassini to produce ever since I first read about what the shape of its mission was going to be. Cassini has an orbit that's sometimes in the plane of Saturn's rings, and sometimes it goes above and below Saturn's rings. I realized very early on that that would permit Cassini to take portraits of Saturn in which we could actually finally, and for the first time, separate the globe of Saturn, the planet Saturn, from its rings. You know, there's no other gas giant that is always crossed by some feature when you're trying to observe it. The rings are always in the way with Saturn.

So this is such a unique perspective. Cassini is looking down onto the North Pole. The sun is coming also from behind Cassini and a little to Cassini's right. And there's no place where the rings actually cross the visible globe of Saturn. Even the shadows of the rings are cast on the southern hemisphere of Saturn away from where we can see it. And so it's this absolutely amazing portrait of this yellowish brown world encircled by a frame of oval-shaped rings produced by Cassini that's sitting in an orbit high above Saturn's North Pole, expertly assembled by a Croatian amateur image processor named Gordon Ugarkovic.

And I could look at this for ages. If you want to take a look at it, it's an October 16 entry in Emily's blog. Be sure to click on it. Click on it twice so that you can look at it in its full glory. It really is quite, quite beautiful. Just one more beautiful thing to mention. Can you tell us about this music video that you posted? Oh, sure. It's just an adorable song originally written as a wake-up song for astronauts. That's sort of a tradition in NASA. Every morning you play a piece of music to wake up the astronauts on the space station or the

shuttle. And Marion Call wrote this. It's cute. It's called Good Morning Moon. And they recently filmed a new video for it in the Visitor Center for the European Space Agency in Noordwijk in the Netherlands. It's a lovely song. We'll go out with a few seconds of it here. I hope they won't mind. Emily, I want to thank you again. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you, Matt. She is the Senior Editor for the Planetary

Society and our Planetary Evangelist, and a Contributing Editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Good morning, moon Love how you do I've got a and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. New Horizons took a quick look as it zoomed out toward Pluto, but Jupiter has not had a long-term visitor from Earth since Galileo finished its stay at that mighty world ten years ago. A new emigre is on its way, and Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute is its boss. I got the Juno Principal Investigator on Skype a few days ago.

This was just after the spacecraft had completed its swing past Earth, picking up speed and setting course for the Jovian system. As you'll hear, Juno went into safe mode as it completed its Earth flyby. As we finished assembling this week's show, all was well, and images of our planet taken by Juno were starting to become available. Scott, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Thank you very much. It's great to be back. Very happy to get you so soon after this big event in the Juno mission, the Earth flyby. As we speak, I understand the spacecraft

is still in safe mode. Is there any reason for us to be concerned about that? Well, the spacecraft is in safe mode. And of course, anytime it's in safe mode, it is a good reason to be concerned, but not overly concerned. Safe mode is one of those amazing engineering feats that NASA engineers have figured out how to do. And basically, it's an intelligent robot, and it's doing just what you want it to do. If there's anything that's unexpected, then the spacecraft is smart enough to figure that out. And it says, okay, this isn't what the humans told me it was supposed to be like. I think I'm just going to go and become safe. I'm going to point to the sun or point to the earth, whatever its directions and safe mode might be.

And I'm going to turn off all the systems that I don't really need. And I'm going to wait for some direction. I'm going to tell the people back on earth that things aren't exactly what I thought they'd be. And I'm going to wait for direction. And that's exactly what the spacecraft did. And that's what it's in now. So by definition, safe mode is safe. That part of it is not a concern.

Usually the concerns are, OK, well, why did I go into that? And is there a problem with one of the systems on board? And we know enough now about Juno to know that that did not occur, that the safe mode is not a symptom of some malfunction of some hardware or something that's going on. Did the flyby accomplish what it was supposed to for the spacecraft? Yes, the flyby actually accomplished exactly what we wanted. The main goal of the flyby was, of course, to utilize the gravity assist in order to get Juno's orbit and trajectory aligned with reaching Jupiter. So we needed to accelerate and change directions, and we did both of those exactly as we had planned.

And so the spacecraft is now on its way to Jupiter, just as expected, and all systems are go. About halfway through the journey, I read. About halfway through in the number of miles or kilometers, that's true. I think about two and three quarter years left. We get there July 4th, 2016. Yeah, a little bit less than three years. That's going to be reason to celebrate. We certainly will be trying to celebrate publicly at the Planetary Society when this happens. Can you talk about how the instruments performed during the flyby? And I I'm assuming that safe mode might have gotten in the way a little bit of some of the science you were hoping to do to sort of test out this

suite of instruments. That's true. It did get in the way a little bit. Fortunately, most of the science and things that we were doing were on the approach, and the safe mode didn't occur until we were right at close approach or near, actually during the eclipse. All the instruments that were turned on and operating operated nominally and got the data that we expected and everything worked really great. And we've got all that data down on the ground now and we're looking through it. But as you say, once you go into safe mode, of course, the spacecraft looks at things and says, what's the most important thing to keep on and what things don't I need? And the science instruments are generally not needed. And so those are one of the things that get turned off in safe mode. They all went off and they are not planned to go back on for a while because we don't really need them. And we weren't planning observations,

scientific ones after Earth flyby anyway. We have at least one listener who is one of the ham radio operators who participated in a special activity that you folks made available for really communicating with the spacecraft, but also part of a test of one of the instruments. Are you familiar with this? I sure am. It was one of the cool things about the Earth flyby

is we have one of our instruments is called WAVES, and it measures plasma waves and radio waves that are normally just natural ones coming out of a magnetosphere or an atmosphere. But we have the capability of measuring things that are human-made, man-made radio or plasma waves. We planned an experiment when we flew by to see if we could detect ham radio operators if they all sent up a signal together, sort of synchronized. We needed enough power to be sent up from the ham radio operators so that the spacecraft could actually sense it. And so there was a scheme kind of put together that was done through the web, and all the ham radio operators were synchronized so that they would know when to push down and send a signal.

They were sending the signal high and they would all push together and then stop at the same time. And they basically sent high in Morse code up to Juno. This is so cool. I'm just thinking of all these ham radio operators on the side of the world, at least, facing the spacecraft, on the side of the world, at least, facing the spacecraft, holding down their Morse code keys in synchronization to talk with this spacecraft that is headed to the outskirts of the solar system. Really, really a very cool thing. I don't have to tell you how excited my boss is about this mission. Have you seen his Why With NIA videos? Oh, yeah, I've seen them all. They're great. Bill Nye is one of the greatest entertainer and educator people that I know.

And I was so happy that he was able to work with us on that and put together this whole Why With Nye series that we have now on YouTube channels. Well, we have an excerpt of one of these videos, just the audio, of course, in last week's radio show. And all the links are available at planetary.org as well as elsewhere. We'll make those available again on the page for this show this week that people can reach from planetary.org slash radio. Now, for those who haven't seen those videos yet, and you may be able to say a few things Bill didn't, to say a few things Bill didn't, remind us of what Juno is going to accomplish, what you hope to learn about this king of planets in our solar system. Juno's headed out to Jupiter to really investigate the origins of Jupiter and the origin of solar systems and how planets are made.

I mean, we have lots of other science goals associated with studying the aurora and the magnetosphere and the atmosphere and what's underneath the clouds. But the really highest level and high priority goal is really to try to investigate how did Jupiter get formed? What was exactly going on in the very early solar system that allowed Jupiter to get created the way it really did? It was probably the first planet. that allowed Jupiter to get created the way it really did. It was probably the first planet. Jupiter is the largest of all the planets,

and it was made of the leftovers after the sun formed. And the rest of the planets, including Earth and everything that created life here, were the leftovers of the leftovers. And so when we want to understand that first step, what happened after the sun formed that allowed all the planets to be made, we have to go back to Jupiter to understand that and explore that type of question. That's Scott Bolton, Principal Investigator for the Juno Mission to Jupiter. We'll continue our conversation in a minute here on Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here.

Thanks for listening each week. Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts? You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter. Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year

creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and my guest, Scott Bolton, is giving us a status report on Juno, the mission to Jupiter that just last week swung past Earth, picking up a final burst of speed.

Scott was telling us before the break that Juno's main objective is to study Jupiter to learn more about how the entire solar system formed. So like so many of these other missions to other planets, this one is going to tell us about our own world. Exactly. A lot of what NASA does is trying to understand nature and our role in the universe and how does the Earth fit in and what's happening to our climate. Some of it is done by a comparative study where, you know, you want to learn about the Earth, you've got to go study the other planets

and see what the similarities and differences are. Also, if you've got questions about how the Earth formed, you've got to go out into the solar system and the universe and try to understand how was any of it made. And we're made of certain elements, what cosmologists would call heavy elements, the carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen, the sulfur, the things that make up the organic compounds that created life and everything that we see here on the earth. And we know that most of the universe, at least the matter universe, is mostly hydrogen and helium. The sun is mostly that. The Jupiter is mostly that. But yet we're not. When we look at Jupiter, we see that although it's almost like a piece of the sun, which is a title of one of Bill's videos, it's a little bit

different than the sun. It has a little bit more of these heavy elements percentage-wise than the Sun does. And we don't understand how that happened, but we know it's really important because the stuff that Jupiter has a little more of is exactly what we're made out of. I think you've got eight instruments on Juno. Does that include this camera that is there as much for those of us who will be following the mission as it is for any science? Well, that doesn't really include. The camera is technically not a science instrument, although a lot of scientists will use it that way, and we're glad to have it on there. But it was really an outreach camera. And then we have a number of

other instruments, as you point out. And exactly how many instruments we have is somewhat debated because some instruments are actually multiple instruments. For instance, the microwave instrument is actually six independent microwave radiometers. I usually avoid trying to say exactly how many instruments I have or how many sensors we have. But we have a full suite and we have eight primary instruments plus this camera we're really happy about how the camera works because we put it out there to take pictures of jupiter mainly and be able to send them right to the public and let the public play with those that data and create images themselves from the raw data the earth flyby was used as a little bit of an experiment to see how well we could do that. And, you know, by the time we were able to take the pictures, even before we were able to process them,

we put out the raw data, and amateurs already processed the data and posted the pictures. So it was really great to see. And not only do you have amateurs processing this data coming from the spacecraft, but Paul Cox of the SLU Community Observatory, he shared a very cool video of Juno crossing the sky during the flyby that he captured. Have you seen that? I have seen that.

I thought that was fantastic, too, to look up in the sky. I mean, we're going by really fast. We look like a moving star, you know, and if you have a little telescope you can actually see that and that movie is so interesting to see us streaking across the sky and that's Juno flying by the Earth on the way to Jupiter

Wow, we've got a little less than three years as we said July 4, 2016 is the day that Juno will insert itself into orbit around Jupiter, but I remember being surprised when I saw the relatively the day that Juno will insert itself into orbit around Jupiter. But I remember being surprised when I saw the relatively short duration of Juno's time at Jupiter before you send it down into the planet, not much more than an Earth year. Is that simply because you'll have completed your work by then,

or is it just too tough an environment to expect you to be able to stick around? It's a little bit of both, because it's too tough an environment to expect you to be able to stick around? It's a little bit of both. Because it's a very tough environment, hazardous because of the radiation, we designed a set of measurements and the spacecraft trajectory in orbit around Jupiter so that it only had to last a little while, that short time, in order to accomplish the science objectives. a little while that short time in order to accomplish the science objectives. There's still hope that we're probably conservative and will maybe last longer than we planned, as many missions do.

But we don't really require that in order to complete our science objectives. Juno's unique in the sense that it has new kinds of instruments that are going to measure new things at Jupiter. And we learned that we wanted to make those measurements based on our understanding from previous spacecraft that have visited Jupiter and explored the solar system. So we kind of learned what the refined questions are that we now need to ask, you know, the bigger questions about where we came from and how Jupiter formed. The way Juno works is getting these new instruments into the right position so that they can make their measurement. So it's not so much a matter of time that we need to see time variability or a long period of observations.

We pretty much need to just get the spacecraft into the right position so that the instruments can actually look and see from this new perspective and learn about what's going on inside of Jupiter. And we do that very quickly. Well, with any luck, by the time our audience hears this program, Juno will be out of safe mode and have resumed its normal profile on its way out to Jupiter. Let me wrap up just by asking you, Scott, what you and the rest of the team will be up to during these many months that are left before July 4, 2016. Well, we'll be taking a look at whatever data we can get on the way out, because that's certainly something that's interesting, the solar wind and making measurements of the galaxy and so forth that we can with our instruments.

But the effort that will really occupy most of our time is planning for these orbits at Jupiter and making sure that we have the right commanding and the science sequences set so that the measurements will all be obtained during those orbits. Our orbits are only 11 days long each, and we go very, very close to Jupiter. Because they're so rapid, we pretty much have to plan out everything ahead of time. There won't be a lot of time to react and plan things in between the orbits, as some outer planet missions do. We go in and we're orbiting pretty quick. So we need that couple of years to go in and make sure that we understand all of the engineering sequences and

all of the science sequences and have everything planned so that when we arrive, we're ready to go. Well, it sounds like you'll be staying very, very busy. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes this morning during what is still a very busy time for the mission. Best of luck, and I certainly look forward to talking to you again. I hope we can talk certainly before orbital insertion, and then we'll make a party of that day. Sounds great to me. I look forward to it. Scott Bolton has been our guest. He directs the Space Science Department.

That's in the Space Science and Engineering Division at that amazing lab known as the Southwest Research Institute. We've been talking to him at their facility in San Antonio, Texas. He's also principal investigator for the Juno mission, now about halfway through its long journey to the king of planets in our solar system. It's time again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

That's the best I can do. You know, I made our listeners an offer they couldn't refuse. Wait till people hear the response. Our Godfather the movie responses today to the contest you gave people a couple of weeks ago. Nice work. Thanks. And nice work to them. All right.

Let's plow through the other stuff. We got Venus still looking stupid bright low in the west shortly after sunset. We've got Jupiter rising around 11 p.m. or midnight over in the east looking quite bright. On October 24th, you can check out the moon hanging out near Jupiter. And in the pre-dawn, we've got Mars up in the southeast looking reddish near the star Regulus. We move on to this week in space history. It was 15 years ago NASA's Deep Space One was launched, primarily a technology demonstration mission, including for demonstrating long-term use of ion engines like those that got used on the Dawn spacecraft later. But it also flew by an asteroid and a comet. On to random space fact.

A little Sicilian nut. Yeah, I have no real control of my accents, as my sons mock me for. Uranus and Neptune have similar masses. So if you compare one of them with Jupiter, let's say Neptune. So the mass of Jupiter compared to the mass of Neptune is about the same as the mass of a golf ball compared to the mass of a ping pong ball. That's a table tennis ball for you more formal people. Wow, that's great. I like that. You always enjoy a good real-world analogy.

I sure do. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And I ask you, what nebula would fit best in the movie The Godfather? And apparently we did great. We had about double the normal response for this contest. Boy, did this one take off. Just captured your imaginations, huh, folks? Almost everybody had the winning response.

But a few people, a couple of people said, must be the pistol nebula. I didn't even know there was a pistol nebula that could, you know, send people to sleep with the fishes. This one came from Cliff Ducharme because he says nothing goes better with gangsters than guns. Yeah, I figured we'd have non-unique solution to this one. So here is our winner, though, picked randomly by Random.org. I think it's a first-time winner. Tim Jamaki. Tim Jamaki of East Haddam, Connecticut, who said, as almost everyone else did, the horse said nebula.

Of course it's a horse. Tim, congratulations. We're going to send you that package from the movie Gravity. I think it's the last one. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. This is the last one we're giving away. Movie is still number one, number one in the U.S. after three weeks, which is quite an accomplishment. And congratulations to all the folks who made it. A lot of nice things said about Sandra Bullock. Can I tell you some of these others that are pretty funny?

Please do. Cindy Thompson, she got it right. She also said, though, well, there ought to be some for other movies. How about The Ring Nebula for? Lord of the Rings, but there's also The Ring. That's true. That's true. She just said Lord of the Rings, but there's also The Ring. That's true, that's true. She just said Lord of the Rings. The Eagle Nebula in Apollo 11, I think she means Apollo 13, and there wasn't an Apollo 11 movie, was there? Maybe there was. You can never get enough Apollo 11 movies, plus that

was the Eagle Lunar Module. Right. This is slightly more obscure. The hourglass nebula in The Wizard of Oz. The one that the witch had that she turned over to show Dorothy how long she had to live. Yeah. Or days of our lives, I suppose. Yes, right. That's the sans. Alright. What else you got, Matt? There were so many on this

theme, but I thought John Gallant got it the best. The obvious answer would be the Horsehead Nebula. However, I doubt it would fit under the covers at the foot of Bruce's bed. Why does it have to be my bed? This is pretty clever. Also the Horsehead Nebula from Daryl Gardner. And all he said was was we're going to

need a bigger bed wait that's a different movie mixing our movie metaphors i guess this is pretty clever from mave hamrick who said that uh usually gets up at 5 30 in the morning just in time to go outside catch a glimpse of orion and the rest of the morning sky. So in a way, I too woke up with a horse head, though not in my bed. All right. Now, this is the one that would win for cleverest from Torsten Zimmer out there in Germany. He said, of course, you're asking for the horse head nebula. But considering the body count of the movie, it should be a messier. I mean, messier object.

So thank you everybody. Very clever stuff. That was fun. Thank you all. What do you got for this time? Well, I'm pulling back from movies this time around. Name the four known inner moons of Jupiter. So the innermost four moons

of Jupiter, all of which interestingly revolve around Jupiter in less than one Earth day, and all of which are interior to the large Galilane satellites. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get us your entry. You'll need to get us the answer by the 28th, October 28th, at 2 p.m. Pacific time. We're going to give away a Planetary Radio t-shirt, the new one. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about cashews. Thank you, and good night. Ah, nuts. He's Bruce Betts. He's pretty nutty.

He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Join my colleague Casey Dreyer on his virtual Cosmos with Cosmos viewing party. It's on now in Casey's blog at planetary.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the jovial members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.